[ale] Hard Drive Failures

[Neal Rhodes]

All the comments have been informative, and while not directly
disagreeing with anyone, I will classify backup/restore into several
categories:

A. The stuff needed to make the box come back up on its hind legs and
dance.   It is really useful to have a bare-iron bootable recover for
this.   It doesn't change terribly often,  only maybe monthly, so
hopefully I can remember to re-do the hardware image.  The problem is,
after 9 months, I'm unlikely to want to restore that same OS image to
the same hardware because the dang world has changed again.   If it's an
IDE drive, I'll want a SATA drive.  If it's Centos 6, then I'll want it
to be Centos 7. 

B. Applications which are a pain to re-install and re-configure.  This
is obviously easier on Linux than that other OS. 

C. My stuff which may exist nowhere else in the world.  It makes sense
to do a file-based incremental backup daily and get this offsite.  I
want this backup to be readable by any OS.  If all the computers in the
office get stolen, I've got to be able to work off the Ubuntu/Vista
notebook. 

D. Stuff which does exist elsewhere, like PDF manual sets, music I own,
stuff that is easy to install.  

So, ideally, (IMHO) I should use a bare-metal bootable strategy on the
OS, (A) but an incremental file based strategy on C, and maybe not even
bother on D, and how to handle B just depends. 

I try to keep a bright red line between the / filesystem versus /home
and always keep "my stuff" on /u, and I'm starting to try to distinguish
between /u "my stuff" and /u2 "stuff I don't care about". 

Neal